In what it calls “an elaborate shell game,” universities and colleges are shifting their financial aid from low-income students to high-income ones to bolster their prestige and raise them up the rankings, a new report says.

Meanwhile, according to the report by the nonprofit, nonpartisan New America Foundation, universities are leaving their poorest families to vie for a piece of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded Pell Grants.

With a population more than twice as Hispanic as the national average, California has a lower-than-average proportion of Hispanics with college or university educations, and no institution among the top five for awarding them degrees, according to a new study.

The state is 38 percent Hispanic, compared to the national average of 17 percent. But only 16 percent of adults aged 25 or older have degrees, compared to the national average for Hispanics of 20 percent, the study, by the advocacy organization Excellencia in Education, finds.

The number of nonacademic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures.

A White House push to increase the college-going rates of of low-income students flies in the face of real-world trends that are heading in exactly the opposite direction—including institutional and federal financial-aid and tax policy that has been shifting in favor of high-income and not low-income families.

Being named one of the 25 best colleges by U.S. News & World Report gets an institution 6 to 10 percent more applications than it would otherwise receive, the research, published in the journal of the American Educational Research Association, shows. Making the top 20 for academic quality in the Princeton Review pushes up the number of applications by 2.3 percent.

Facing stagnant enrollment and increasingly price-conscious consumers, already cash-strapped universities will continue to see their revenues fail to keep up with inflation, the bond-rating agency Moody’s Investment Service says.

At a time when research shows that academic advising is a key to helping college students graduate on time, most say they aren’t getting it.

Sixty percent of students say someone other than an academic advisor is a primary source of information about their schoolwork. About a third of freshmen and 18 percent of seniors rely on friends and family, and another 18 percent on faculty who are not assigned as their advisors.

Complaints from students about the way financing companies are handling student loans are eerily similar to the problems that frustrated mortgage-holders in the wake of the financial crisis, and cost some of them their homes, according to a government report.

In its second annual review of student-loan practices, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, says loan servicers make it hard for borrowers to pay off their loans early and, unless recipients provide explicit instructions, divide up early or partial payments in ways that are the most expensive to consumers.